Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us

By Chris Hedges

Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.

The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates.

Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers. They have poisoned our soil with pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped nutrients and phosphorus into water systems, causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the onslaught of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, are declining in the Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out the tomato crop. The draconian Food Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our governing elite to corporations, means small farms will only continue to dwindle in number. Sites such as La Via Campesina do a good job of tracking these disturbing global trends.

“The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical,” activist Henry Harris of the Food Security Roundtable told me. The group builds distribution systems between independent farmers and city residents.

“Food is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power,” he said. “The national food system is collapsing by degrees. More than 50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central Valley of California. What happens when gasoline becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the cropland? The monolithic system of food production is highly unstable. It has to be replaced very soon with small, diverse sources that provide greater food security.”

Cornell University recently did a study to determine whether New York state could feed itself. The research is described in two articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. If all agricultural land were in use, and food distribution were optimized to minimize the total distance that food travels, New York state could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of its food needs met from within its boundaries. This is not encouraging news to those who live in New York City. New York once relied on New Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead of having food shipped from across the country. But New Jersey farms have largely given way to soulless housing developments. Farming communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up and desolate, have been gutted by industrial farming.

The ties most Americans had to rural communities during the Great Depression kept many alive. A barter economy replaced the formal economy. Families could grow food or had relatives to feed them. But in a world where we do not know where our food comes from, or how to produce it, we have become vulnerable. And many will be forced, as food prices continue to rise, to shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced foods, already a staple of the nation’s poor. Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes and heart disease, is often the only food those in the inner city can buy because supermarkets and nutritious food are geographically and financially beyond reach. As the economy continues to deteriorate, the middle class will soon join them.

“It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land,” Wendell Berry observed in “The Unsettling of America.” “Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land’ because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”

Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his family has farmed for generations, argues that local farming is fundamental to sustaining communities. Industrial farming, he says, has estranged us from the land. It has rendered us powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left us complicit in the corporate destruction of the ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has been as devastating as its physical cost.

“The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat,” writes Berry. “They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely—consumptive machines—which is to say, the slaves of producers. What … model farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist enterprise—that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.”

The nascent effort by communities to reclaim local food production is the first step toward reclaiming lives severed and fragmented by corporate culture. It is more than a return to local food production. It is a return to community. It brings us back to the values that sustain community. It is a return to the recognition of the fragility, interconnectedness and sacredness of all living systems and our dependence on each other. It turns back to an ethic that can save us.

“[The commercial] revolution … , ” writes Berry, “did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

“The inevitable result of such an economy,” Berry adds, “is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime’s devotion. ‘Waste,’ in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans—the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested’ farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.’ Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump.”

A 9/11 Reality Check

By Robert Scheer

What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?

As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”

We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women’s breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.

Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.

In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.

We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.

But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy—although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of terrorists.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that torture was efficient actually “fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”

So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on 9/11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.

STRESS TEST-CLICK THE PICTURES TO SEE IF THEY MOVE

The patterns are used to test the level of stress a person can handle.

The slower the pictures move, the better your ability of handling stress.

Alleged criminals that were tested see them spinning around madly.

However, senior citizens and kids see them standing still.

None of these images are animated - they are perfectly still.

How did you do with the test?



If you did NOT see any movement in the patterns,

look closely at the following photo.

STEPS TO MINIMIZE THE FLU THREATS

Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid specialist) having clinical experience of over 20 years. He has worked in institutions like Hinduja Hospital ,Bombay H ospital , Saifee Hospital , Tata Memorial etc.. Presently, he is heading our Nuclear Medicine Department and Thyroid clinic at Riddhivinayak Cardiac and Critical Centre, Malad (W).
The following message given by him, I feel makes a lot of sense and is important for all to know

The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat. In a global epidemic of this nature, it's almost impossible to avoid coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions. Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is.

While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):
1. Frequent hand-washing (well highlighted in all official communications).

2. "Hands-off-the-face" approach. Resist all temptations to touch any part of face (unless you want to eat, bathe or slap).
3. *Gargle twice a day with warm salt water (use Listerine if you don't trust salt). *H1N1 takes 2-3 days after initial infection in the throat/ nasal cavity to proliferate and show characteristic symptoms. Simple gargling prevents proliferation. In a way, gargling with salt water has the same effect on a healthy individual that Tamiflu has on an infected one. Don't underestimate this simple, inexpensive and powerful preventative method.
4. Similar to 3 above, *clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm salt water. *Not everybody may be good at Jala Neti or Sutra Neti (very good Yoga asanas to clean nasal cavities), but *blowing the nose hard once a day and swabbing both nostrils with cotton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bringing down viral population.*
5.. *Boost your natural immunity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C (Amla and other citrus fruits). *If you have to supplement with Vitamin C tablets, make sure that it also has Zinc to boost absorption.

6. *Drink as much of warm liquids (tea, coffee, etc) as you can. *Drinking warm liquids has the same effect as gargling, but in the reverse direction. They wash off proliferating viruses from the throat into the stomach where they cannot survive, proliferate or do any harm.

I suggest you pass this on to your entire e-list. You never know who might pay attention to it - and STAY ALIVE because of it.

Progressives Pay the Price for Confusing a Party With a Movement

By David Sirota

The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive “movement” have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.

Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, anti-war and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor—specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members—janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other “regular folks”—to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).

This wasn’t totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed that Democratic Party promotion was key to progressive movement causes. And anyway, during the Bush era, many of those causes automatically helped Democrats by indicting Republicans.

But after the 2008 election, the strategy’s bankruptcy is undeniable.

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As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic leaders who today obstruct serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups’ resources helped elect a government that pretends sham “cap and trade” bills represent environmental progress. Health care groups promising to push a single-payer system got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a “public option” to compete with private insurance. And anti-war funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess, and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.

Of course, frustrated progressives might be able to forgive the groups that promised different results, had these postelection failures prompted course corrections.

For example, had the left’s pre-eminent groups responded to Democrats’ health care capitulations by immediately announcing campaigns against these Democrats, progressives could feel confident that these groups were back to prioritizing a movement agenda. Likewise, had the big anti-war organizations reacted to Obama’s Afghanistan escalation plans with promises of electoral retribution, we would know those organizations were steadfastly loyal to their anti-war brand.

But that hasn’t happened. Despite the president’s health care retreat, most major progressive groups continue to cheer him on, afraid to lose their White House access and, thus, their Beltway status. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Moveon.org has “yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan” while VoteVets’ leader all but genuflected to Obama, saying, “People [read: professional political operatives] do not want to take on the administration.”

In this vacuum, movement building has been left to underfunded (but stunningly successful) projects like Firedoglake.com, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and local organizations. And that’s the lesson: True grass-roots movements that deliver concrete legislative results are not steered by marble-columned institutions, wealthy benefactors or celebrity politicians—and they are rarely ever run from Washington. They are almost always far-flung efforts by those organized around real-world results—those who don’t care about party conventions, congressional cocktail parties or White House soirees they were never invited to in the first place.

Only when enough progressives realize that truism will any movement—and any change—finally commence.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

From ‘Do No Harm’ to Torture

By Eugene Robinson

Torture is a delicate business. The aim is to injure but not incapacitate—to inflict precisely enough pain and terror to break a subject’s will, but no more. To calibrate the proper degree of abuse, the torturer must have an accurate sense of how much agony the subject’s mind and body can tolerate.

In the Bush administration’s program of “enhanced interrogation,” this expertise was provided by doctors and psychologists—professionals who are supposed to heal and comfort. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights assembles the evidence and reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: “Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture.”

Dwell on that for a moment, especially if you believe the Bush administration’s decision to submit terrorism suspects to medieval interrogation practices was somehow justifiable—or even if you believe that torture was wrong but that now we should “look forward” and pretend it never happened. This is how torture warps a society and distorts its values.

Much of the information cited by Physicians for Human Rights had previously been unearthed, but some new details were disclosed in the CIA inspector general’s report released last week—revealing “a level of ethical misconduct that had not previously come to light,” in the words of the human rights group.

From sources that include published reports, an inquiry by the International Committee of the Red Cross and various documents pried out of the government by organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, here is some of what we know:

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The interrogation program—using 11 abusive “enhanced” techniques, including waterboarding—was designed by two Ph.D. psychologists. The techniques, according to a statement released in April by American Psychological Association President James H. Bray, “are tantamount to torture as defined by APA and international law.”

Said the APA: “The central tenet of psychology’s code of ethics is, like that of medicine, to do no harm. It is unthinkable that any psychologist could assert that stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, exploiting phobias, and waterboarding—along with other forms of torture techniques that the American Psychological Association has condemned and prohibited—cause no lasting damage to a human being’s psyche.”

According to Bray, “There is one ethical response to an order to torture: Disobey the order.”

We know that medical doctors were asked to sign off on the “enhanced” techniques. We know from detainees themselves, as quoted by the Red Cross, that there was medical monitoring of waterboarding sessions. We know from the CIA inspector general’s report that a 2004 letter from a Justice Department official reauthorizing the use of waterboarding specified a maximum of two two-hour sessions per day, with both a doctor and a psychologist present.

From the torturer’s point of view, this probably looks like compassion—an attempt to ensure that interrogators didn’t go too far, that they didn’t cause permanent harm, that they stayed within bureaucratic guidelines. But from any other perspective, it’s simply and starkly grotesque.

That any medical doctor would help design or review a program of torture, let alone be present when an abusive interrogation amounting to torture was being conducted, would be a gross ethical violation.

The American Medical Association’s code of ethics “forcefully states medicine’s opposition to torture or coercive interrogation and prohibits physician participation in such activities,” according to a letter AMA officials sent to President Barack Obama in April. AMA guidelines state that “physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation,” and that doctors “must not monitor interrogations with the intention of intervening in the process, because this constitutes direct participation.”

So how was our government supposed to conduct abusive interrogations without the guidance of psychologists to tell them whether they were irreparably damaging the subject’s mind or physicians to tell them whether they were irreparably damaging the subject’s body? It would have been impossible.

Doctors and psychologists might have been able to prevent this whole shameful episode by refusing to participate. Instead, professionals who were trained in the healing arts used their experience and skill in a way that facilitated harm. They played a vital role in enabling torture.

I like to believe that some psychologists and physicians took a stand and said no. As for those who said yes, the law should hold them accountable—just as conscience, one hopes, is already doing.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Health Care’s Senior Moments

By Ellen Goodman

When exactly did the Republicans start operating one of those marketing scams that target the elderly?

It was bad enough when Sarah Palin told a bald Facebook lie that there were “death panels” in the plans to reform health care. It was worse to see Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley flunk the “pants on fire” test as he seconded this myth. Republicans planted the fear that President Obama wants to “kill Granny.” Now they want Granny to kill health care reform.

I understand the marketing. Seniors were the only age group that Obama lost in last year’s election. He was change they didn’t believe in. Now polls suggest the folks covered by Medicare are the least likely to think health care reform will help them. In Gallup polls, almost 40 percent think it will worsen their care.

Then last week Republican Chairman Michael Steele began to sell a “Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights”—a pitch that contained no rights but an awful lot of frights. He targeted folks like the white-haired South Carolina man who furiously insisted at a town hall meeting: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” (Memo to the fact-checkers: Public Policy Polling reports that 62 percent of Republicans also think that government should keep out of that government-run program!)

Steele promised, among other things, to outlaw “any effort to ration health care based on age” and “prevent government from dictating the terms of end-of-life care.” I would stipulate that neither of these things is in any version of the bill, but that would just reduce my chance of being invited on Fox News from zero to none.

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He also promised to “protect Medicare”—presumably from the plan to save $500 billion out of a projected growth in its spending. He did not mention that the proposals would also close the “doughnut hole” in prescription drug coverage, provide subsidies to low-income seniors and give the Medicare trust fund five more years of life.

This is not just a robo-call to enlist senior citizens in making this Obama’s “Waterloo.” Republicans are basing the sales pitch on the idea that expensive care is the best care and that what elders really want is more. In health care, that translates into endless doctors visits, tests, procedures and maybe even more ventilators.

Could we put that on hold? First of all, “senior” is now a political demographic that encompasses a huge and varied life span. It includes someone who was fighting in World War II and someone who was born during World War II. What you might want at 65 you might not want at 85.

Second, with age and experience comes the knowledge that more is not always better. Nor are doctors the only people to assess what’s necessary.

In the wake of Ted Kennedy’s death, there were questions delicately—and sometimes, I fear, indelicately—raised about his treatment for brain cancer. This aggressive, cutting-edge treatment gave him about the same survival time as standard care would have done. This was mostly good time. But other bereaved families are left asking whether they prolonged life or prolonged suffering. They are left unsure whether doing “everything” for their elders was the right thing.

The fear-mongers are also selling the idea that there is something pernicious about a designated panel of experts studying and comparing the effectiveness of treatments. Such panels are not, as advertised, an automatic precursor to “rationing” but hopefully an aid to behaving rationally. Why would you not want to know what treatment was effective?

And if we may go back to the voluntary end-of-life conversations so deliberately framed as euthanasia, this may yet produce a gray backlash. Remember when conservatives thought that “rescuing” Terri Schiavo was a political winner? Seniors didn’t see it that way. There is a leap of illogic that turns a conversation into coercion. How many of the elderly politicians who took this item out of the Senate bill have themselves signed a living will?

Finally, and forgive my optimism, I don’t think older Americans are dupes for generational conflict. The Medicare cohort is being told they can only protect what they have—a government-run plan called Medicare—by trashing a public option for their children. They’re being told to protect their Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights by denying rights for those who are younger and uninsured.

If someone comes selling that as your legacy, Granny, check your caller ID and block that con artist.

Ellen Goodman’s e-mail address is ellengoodman1(at)me.com.

Distorting the Voice of the People

By E.J. Dionne

Health care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

It’s also clear that the anger that got so much attention largely reflects a fringe right-wing view opposed to all sorts of government programs most Americans support. Much as the far left of the anti-war movement commanded wide coverage during the Vietnam years, so now are extremists on the right hogging the media stage—with the media’s complicity.

Over the last week, I’ve spoken with Democratic House members, many from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television.

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“I think the media coverage has done a disservice by falling for a trick that you’d think experienced media hands wouldn’t fall for: of allowing loud voices to distort the debate,” said Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, whose district includes Columbus, Ohio.

At her town halls, she said, “I got serious questions, I got hostile questions, I got questions about how this would work, I got questions about how much it will cost. I also got a lot of comments from people who said it’s important for their families and businesses to get health care reform.”

Rep. Frank Kratovil hails from a very conservative district on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and says it didn’t bother him that he was hung in effigy in July by a right-wing group. “As a former prosecutor, I consider that to be mild,” he said with a chuckle. The episode, he added, was not at all typical of his town hall meetings where “most of the people were there to express legitimate concerns about the bill, wondering about how it was going to impact them” and also wanting “to know the truth about some of the things that were being said about the bill.”

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: “Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up.” As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No “news” there.

Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas is one member who did attend gatherings dominated by boisterous opponents of health reform.

At a meeting in Waco, a man asked him what constitutional authority the federal government had to get involved in health care. Edwards replied, “Article One, Section Eight,” which includes authority for Congress to provide for the “general welfare of the United States.” Then Edwards asked the man if he opposed “the federal government being involved in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and children’s health care.” The man said he was, and the room roared its approval.

“I will wear it as a badge of honor that I was shouted at by people who oppose Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and children’s health,” Edwards said. The shouters, he added, did not speak for most of his constituents, but for “the Ron Paul libertarian position that represents 2 to 5 percent of the country.”

When I reached Rep. Tom Perriello last week, he divided the crowds at the 17 town halls he had held to that point in his largely rural Virginia district into three groups: conservatives, for whom the health care battle is “about big government, socialism and all that”; the left, for whom “it’s about corporate accountability”; and a “middle” for whom “it’s about health care costs” and the problems with their coverage.

But the only citizens who commanded widespread media coverage last month were the right-wingers. And I bet you thought the media were “liberal.”

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Cheney Plays to His Crowd

In politics as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s most recent and thoroughly extraordinary public support of torture has produced, with almost mathematical precision, the following chain of events:

People who think Cheney is scary in his defense of violating international treaties and U.S. laws, smashing the heads of suspected terrorists against walls, threatening them with rape and electric drills and subjecting them to waterboarding—an ordeal perfected in the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition—howled. They believe Cheney is completely gonzo.

As soon as this reaction to his imperious appearance on Fox News settled in, the equal and opposite reaction was heard: Cheney is completely right. And just trotting him out to promote his forthcoming memoir—“It is going to be a great book,” Cheney helpfully tells us—isn’t enough. Why not have him run for president?

This, too, inspires a reaction: Go ahead. Make my day.

The rhetorical Cheney-for-president boomlet was touched off by The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who mused that the 2012 campaign might well be waged on national security issues—assuming, as it is reasonable to assume—that something will put President Barack Obama on the defensive over foreign policy. And if that comes to pass, Taranto speculated, who better than Dick Cheney to represent the Republicans?

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Indeed, few can differentiate themselves from George W. Bush by making the former president appear to be a prudent moderate. Cheney is expert at it.

Though much attention is given to Cheney’s energetic support of torture, less has been drawn to his apparent willingness to start yet another Middle East war, this one with Iran. Asked by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace why the Bush administration didn’t “take out the Iranian nuclear program,” Cheney replied: “It wasn’t my decision to make. ... I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues.”

Cheney noted, pointedly, that the Bush administration decided to pursue diplomacy but the Iranian nuclear program continues apace. “We can speculate about, what might have happened if we’d followed a different course of action,” he said. “As I say, I was an advocate of a more robust policy than any of my colleagues. But I didn’t make the decision.”

The decision, had Cheney made it, would likely have been to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Such an attack would almost certainly have touched off a broader Middle East conflict, further inflamed regional passions against Israel (on whose behalf it would be assumed the U.S. acted), alienated allies around the world and destroyed any chance that Iraq would emerge from years of war and occupation as politically independent from the influence of the neighboring regime in Iran.

Top Pentagon officials were on record as opposing such a bombing campaign. Obviously the military has enough on its hands with the botched Iraq endeavor and the equally botched war in Afghanistan, both of which were prosecuted by the Bush-Cheney team. These conflicts now present persistent crises for the United States. They continue to kill and maim hundreds of American servicemen and -women, and the wars may well entangle us right through the 2012 election season.

It would be easy—too easy—to dismiss Cheney as a cranky old man, a political has-been or just a budding author out to sell some books. He is all these, and more. He represents the thinking of a significant number of conservatives who still believe that the United States is a unique and unrivaled global power that can bomb, invade, occupy and torture its way to security. The ancient Romans believed much the same.

The influence of this vocal group within the Republican Party means that any of its presidential contenders will have to answer to it. So if the fanciful prospect of a Cheney presidential candidacy is too laughable to give it much thought, ponder the distinct possibility of Sarah Palin relying on this crowd for her foreign policy tutorials.

Laugh again. But Obama is going to spend most of his first term trying to clean up the foreign policy messes left by the Bush administration, and it is not at all clear that he will succeed. If it turns out that national security worries nag at the electorate in three years, voters deserve more than reckless bombast as an alternative.

Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.

Tales from the Street Trades-fred reed

You probably don’t like cops. Nobody does. Ride with them. See what they see. You’ll get a little perspective. You won’t ike it, but you’ll get it.

It was August, near National Airport, and the guy lost his girlfriend and blew his brains out in the bushes. We found him by the smell. Flesh sliding off his face, sternum white through his chest, and my god the maggots. “Think CPR might help?” I asked, ever the wise guy. You get a tough-guy attitude, not because you want to be a tough guy but because otherwise you would go into a bar and never come out.

When children are burned alive in fires, which happens in shitty tenements with corrupt inspectors, they turn exactly the dark pink of a Christmas ham, except their bellies explode and things come out. There isn’t enough bourbon, not anywhere. You like children’s stories? If you hold the hands of a girl of three in a pan of boiling water, you get what are called “immersion cuffs.” She screams a lot because she doesn’t understand why Mommy is hurting her. Usually the mother does it, next the dirtbag new boyfriend, almost never the father.

There are people cops don’t much like, such as retail crack-dealers hangin,’ bangin,’ and slangin.’ Others they just don’t understand, such as faggots, or have a quiet sympathy for, such as whores. Some people they want to hurt, hurt bad. Child abusers, for example, or pimps running thirteen-year-old runaways.

I went with a DC cop to interview a rape victim of fifteen in some hospital. She was screaming, sobbing, out of her mind despite sedation—the usual. The guy had roughed her up pretty good. The protocol is never to mention the perp’s race but, if the girl is white, there’s no need. If you think rape is a sexual crime, you have a lot to learn. You don’t risk three years in jail and cripple a woman for something you can buy on any street corner for ten bucks.

The cop came out and said quietly, “I hope I arrest the the guy.” The jaw muscles said the perp would be red blubbering goo. You can’t get too involved.

Police brutality has its appeal at times. It really does.

You may think you know idiots. No. Cops know idiots. You’ve seen those shoes with the bright red lights built into them that flash when you walk? Some knucklehead in 7-D, in Anacostia, was wearing them. He mugged a pedestrian and ran into a dark wood to hide. I’ve known smarter lug nuts. Seven-D also had a security-camera picture of a prisoner whose head was so narrow he could slip between the bars of his cell.

Of the street trades, med-techs get less credit and deserve more than most. They see the ugly stuff. I rode once with the super of the Arlington, Virginia fire department. Fire departments have a problem because buildings don’t burn very well, what with concrete walls and steel fire doors. So they do a lot of ambulance work. I once saw a hook-and-ladder truck respond to a miscarriage. The paramedic did his job perfectly well, but it seemed an odd way to get to the scene.

Anyway the super and I went to a call somewhere in the burbs and found this old guy, maybe seventy, bumping off walls. He’d walk as if seeing nothing, hit the wall, turn, and bump into another wall. The reason was his wife of decades who was lying face up on the floor with her face purple and breathing, if that’s the word, with a noise I still don’t like to think about. Surprise, huh? We all reach the exit door, she had, he knew it, and he had just lost it. The med guys put her pressure at something like 375/280, a number you could have inflated a truck tire with, and put her in the ambulance because that’s what amblulance crews do, not because there was the slightest reason. The super and I drove off. She may have exploded in the ambulance.

I’m not kidding about getting hard, about turning off. You’re a surgeon at Med-Star, a shock-trauma unit. The chopper brings in a kid of seven, horribly screwed up. Maybe a truck hit him, or he fell into a cement mixer, or it was an asteroid strike. As a surgeon you don’t care what did it, only how to fix it. Blood, you say, I need blood, more blood. The brain is swelling badly, all those machines that say beep-beep and aren’t supposed to have flat lines on them are saying the wrong things and you work desperately for three hours and the kid is dead. Depending on how your head works, you say “Oh, fuck,” and catch the second half of the Redskins versus the Steelers.

One night somewhere in suburban Maryland, maybe Kensington, some guy thought eighty miles an hour was a reasonable speed. It was about how fast he came through the windshield when he hit something. Bythe time I got there with the cop I was riding with he was lying on the pavement and an ambulance crew was working on him for no particular reason. Red gunch was spewing from his mouth, which I suppose is what happens when your chest is completely crushed. A woman paramedic dived into a bag with that fast but controlled way they do things and started intubating what amounted to a cadaver. Women can’t carry stretchers, but they can sure do medicine.

Another ambulance had showed up and wasn’t doing anything because there wasn’t anything for it to do. A gal on the crew knew my cop and so a conversation started, hey, how’s the wife? We ought to get together, ribs and beer, how the kids doing?

Heartless with some guy going liquid, drowning in his blood ten feet away? No. You can’t get involved. There isn’t that much bourbon. If you can save the guy, you do, and that feels good. If he croaks, you say “Fuck it, let’s get a burger.” Or go to the psych ward and turn yourself in. Those are the choices.
Last Updated: 02/27/2009 10:45 pm
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Will Japan’s New Leader Maintain His Country’s Fealty to Washington?

The landslide election of Japan’s Democratic Party in last weekend’s parliamentary vote parallels the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency last November.

In both cases opposition parties long out of power (in the Japanese case, all but totally excluded from national power during the six decades of the postwar Japanese government’s existence) have been elected at a time of crisis to change the nation’s policy.

Such changes are easier to talk about than think about, or worse, actually to accomplish, as Barack Obama has already found out. In Japan’s case, the main problems are those of Japan’s economy, and of its political and security relationship to the United States: one of tactful fealty to Washington, unchanged since Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.

This relationship initially made sense, allowing Japan to become a great economic power in circumstances of security, despite the war in Korea, the tensions that followed, and subsequent political upheavals in China.

It must also eventually come to an end, and this could become a problem for the newly elected Democratic Party government in Tokyo.
The negatives for Japan in this institutionalized subordination to the United States have become heavy to bear, not only politically but in certain ways psychologically, and even spiritually. Japan, after all, from its brilliant successes early in the Meiji era, in its 1904-1905 war with Russia, to its defeat by American nuclear bombs in 1945, was probably the most dynamic, ambitious and nationalistic country on Earth.

The leader of the victorious Democratic Party of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama, has written about two aspects of the American relationship to Japan today. The first is economic. In an essay published prior to the election, first in Japan and then syndicated around the world, he criticized American-led “unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism,” in which “people are treated not as an end but as a means [and] human dignity is lost.”

He wrote of respect for the “local economic practices that have been fostered through our traditions.” This is a sympathetic position, but it is not clear what he means in practice, even though he suggests that America’s world economic domination is waning.

Japan’s economic success during the years of its greatest prosperity was based on innovative and stylish consumer products of very high technology, sold in the advanced global markets. In addition, its heavy industry was a world leader. Today its competition in consumer goods is great, mainly but not exclusively from other Asian countries, and in heavy industry the competition is from Germany, France and Italy. China, of course, is determined to become a world competitor in every sector.

China’s ambition is usually interpreted as first to replace Japan as Asia’s most important economy, which it may soon do in scale. But it is not likely to outstrip Japan in technological and industrial sophistication for a long time. In discussions of China, there is a persistent tendency toward overestimation, because of China’s size and population, but the productivity of the workforce, and the industrial value added, are the relevant measures.

The most important political question faced by a Japan led by the Democratic Party concerns the Japanese-American security relationship. Mr. Hatoyama is deliberately vague on the question, and a Democratic Party colleague says “it’s complete nonsense” to think that the election of the Democrats will hurt U.S.-Japan relations. But he then adds that “there are many things left unchanged from the last 50 years that need to be re-examined.”

Other Japanese observe that at a time when China is developing its military power and enlarging its global reliance on raw materials, the U.S. military presence in North Asia and the Japanese-American security alliance are sources of stability.

There are, however, two issues the Democrats must face. One is public opinion. The subordinate place Japan occupies in the relationship is humiliating: as an advanced base for American military operations in Asia that have nothing to do with Japan’s security, and on which Japan has no voice (the case during the Vietnam war decade, and now with the war in Afghanistan).

The physical burden of the bases, and the social consequences of having some 50,000 foreign troops in your country, occupying bases for which Japan pays 40 percent of the costs, plus 100 percent of associated labor costs, is both onerous and increasingly exploitative.

These troops were first stationed in Japan as a defeated and unarmed country; then as a base of operations in the Korean War; and subsequently as a base for American operations anywhere in the world. The original security treaty in 1951 stipulated that American troops would remain until Japan was able to undertake its own defense. It has been able to do so for many years. Japan’s present military forces number nearly a quarter-million men and women.

The second issue is who profits from the security relationship.

What does the United States really furnish to Japan’s defense?

Putting aside North Korea, which is unlikely to wish to invade Japan (or even to fire rockets at it to attract attention and concessions), the think-tank scenarios of potential war in the Far East relate to the rise of China, whose primary enemy would presumably be the United States—not Japan. It is not evident that being America’s principal ally and base in the region would then be to Japan’s advantage.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

Obama’s Meaningless War

True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, beginning with his war on poverty, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.

Meaningless is the right term for the Afghanistan war, too, because our bloody attempt to conquer this foreign land has nothing to do with its stated purpose of enhancing our national security. Just as the government of Vietnam was never a puppet of Communist China or the Soviet Union, the Taliban is not a surrogate for al-Qaida. Involved in both instances was an American intrusion into a civil war whose passions and parameters we never fully grasped and could not control militarily.

The Vietnamese Communists were not an extension of an inevitably hostile, unified international communist enemy, as evidenced by the fact that Communist Vietnam and Communist China are both our close trading partners today. Nor should the Taliban be considered simply an extension of a Mideast-based al-Qaida movement, whose operatives the U.S. recruited in the first place to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Those recruits included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and financier Osama bin Laden, who met in Afghanistan as part of a force that Ronald Reagan glorified as “freedom fighters.” As blowback from that bizarre, mismanaged CIA intervention, the Taliban came to power and formed a temporary alliance with the better-financed foreign Arab fighters still on the scene.

There is no serious evidence that the Taliban instigated the 9/11 attacks or even knew about them in advance. Taliban members were not agents of al-Qaida; on the contrary, the only three governments that financed and diplomatically recognized the Taliban—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan—all were targets of bin Laden’s group.

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To insist that the Taliban be vanquished militarily as a prerequisite for thwarting al-Qaida is a denial of the international fluidity of that terrorist movement. Al-Qaida, according to U.S. intelligence sources, has operated effectively in countries as disparate as Somalia, Indonesia, England and Pakistan, to name just a few. What is required to stymie such a movement is effective police and intelligence work, as opposed to deploying vast conventional military forces in the hope of finding, or creating, a conventional war to win. This last wan hope is what the effort in Afghanistan—in the last two months at its most costly point in terms of American deaths—is all about: marshaling massive firepower to fight shadows.

The Taliban is a traditional guerrilla force that can easily elude conventional armies. Once again the generals on the ground are insisting that a desperate situation can be turned around if only more troops are committed, as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal did in a report leaked this week. Even with U.S. forces being increased to 68,000 as part of an 110,000-strong allied army, the general states, “The situation in Afghanistan is serious. …” In the same sentence he goes on to say “but success is achievable.”

Fortunately, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is given to some somber doubts on this point, arguing that the size of the U.S. force breeds its own discontents: “I have expressed some concerns in the past about the size of the American footprint, the size of the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan,” he said. “And, clearly, I want to address those issues. And we will have to look at the availability of forces, we’ll have to look at costs.”

I write the word fortunately because just such wisdom on the part of Robert McNamara, another defense secretary, during the buildup to Vietnam would have led him to oppose rather than abet what he ruefully admitted decades after the fact was a disastrous waste of life and treasure: 59,000 Americans dead, along with 3.4 million Indochinese, mostly innocent civilians. I was reporting from Vietnam when that buildup began, and then as now there was an optimism not supported by the facts on the ground. Then as now there were references to elections and supporting local politicians to win the hearts and minds of people we were bombing. Then as now the local leaders on our side turned out to be hopelessly corrupt, a condition easily exploited by those we term the enemy.

Those who favor an escalation of the Afghanistan war ought to own up to its likely costs. If 110,000 troops have failed, will we need the half million committed at one point to Vietnam, which had a far less intractable terrain? And can you have that increase in forces without reinstituting the draft?

It is time for Democrats to remember that it was their party that brought America its most disastrous overseas adventure and to act forthrightly to pull their chosen president back from the abyss before it is too late.

By Robert Scheer

The Science Fiction of Military Marketing

I’m a video game geek, so as I sat through movie previews a few weeks ago, I was sure I was watching Nintendo ads.

There on the cinema’s screen was a super-sleek plane flying over a moonscape while communicating with an orbiting satellite. In the next moment, a multi-colored topographical map, orders being barked—and in my own mind, memories of “Call of Duty” graphics. And then, finally, two guys in front of a computer console, and the jarring punch line: “It’s not science fiction; it’s what we do every day,” said the bold type, followed by a U.S. Air Force symbol.

Before giving the audience a chance to digest the slogan, it was onto another montage, this one of helicopters and explosions with 1970s music playing in the background. A preview for a Steve McQueen-themed game, I thought. Then, though, the familiar kicker: “The drones fight terrorism and protect America, and in the process, they keep the frontlines unmanned,” said the voiceover, adding, “This isn’t science fiction; this is life in the United States Navy.”

The ads preceded “The Hurt Locker”—a dramatized movie about soldiers who defuse roadside bombs in the midst of Iraq’s horrifying carnage. And even with its fictionalized dialogue, the film was far more honest than the U.S. military’s fantastical sales pitch. Join the armed forces, the ads suggest, and you don’t have to experience the blood-and-guts consequences of combat. Instead, you get to hang out stateside, entertaining yourself with a glorified PlayStation.

During this, one of the bloodiest months in the Afghanistan war, the spots promote a somewhat comforting, if disturbingly misleading, message—and it is aimed not just at potential soldiers, but also at the public at large.

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For the former, the goal is reassurance. As Bush-era attempts to conflate bellicosity and patriotism were undermined by persistent body bags, military recruitment has become more challenging. In response, the Pentagon hopes to make prospective volunteers believe their tours of duty will be as safe as a night on the couch.

For the general public, the objective is sedation. New polls show the country strongly opposes the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—but military officials want to preserve the possibility of an escalation in Afghanistan and a permanent deployment in Iraq. So along with persuading President Obama to withhold photos documenting fog-of-war brutalities at Afghanistan and Iraq prisons, the Pentagon is seeking an opiate to placate the war-averse populace. What better anodyne than a marketing campaign implying wars are fun video games?

Certainly, the ads aren’t pure “science fiction.” As the armed forces build more unmanned drones, Popular Science magazine reports that recruiters are indeed looking to add new remote pilots. The “science fiction” is the specific assertion that “the frontlines are unmanned.” Claims like that are deeply destructive, beyond their obvious insult to the thousands killed, wounded and/or currently stationed on those very frontlines.

For instance, it’s a good bet more than a few enlistees will expect their service to be happy video game tournaments, only to find themselves dodging real bullets in a Baghdad shooting gallery.

More broadly, the American psyche’s slow progress toward an increasingly peaceful disposition could be stunted by the propaganda’s powerful paradox: While sanitizing ads play to the country’s growing disgust with militarism, they could ultimately lead us to be more supportive of militarism. How? By convincing us that violence can be just another innocuous expression of adolescent technophilia.

If we end up thinking that, we will have once again forgotten what all wars, even the justifiable ones, always are: lamentable human tragedies.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

Law, Not Torture, Protects National Security

By Joe Conason

Predictably as always, the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative media are berating Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding to investigate the CIA’s use of abusive interrogation methods on terror suspects.

They warn that probing this sensitive history will compromise intelligence operations and endanger the nation. They insist that these techniques have, in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. They suggest that the attorney general should simply ignore the evidence of illegal conduct and “investigate the terrorists instead,” as if the Justice Department cannot do both.

But as those politicians and pundits ought to understand by now, the American system of justice was always meant to do both—that is, to apprehend and prosecute criminals, and to ensure that those who apprehend them do not violate the law in doing so. That system routinely investigates law enforcement officials who use excessive force because we recognize that the credibility and authority of the law depends on universal accountability.

Voices on the right have often protested prosecutions of police officers and sheriffs because, they claim, such accountability will lead to higher crime. Yet in fact, the declining crime rates of the past three decades have coincided with stronger efforts to ensure that the police observe the rights of suspects and avoid the use of undue violence.

By the same principle, any nation that professes to live under constitutional governance must be able to ensure that its intelligence professionals observe relevant laws, including the international treaties that ban torture and abuse of prisoners. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, even the president’s wartime authority, that permits the chief executive and his minions to assume dictatorial power. So the attorney general must investigate abuses committed in their name.

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According to Cheney, however, preserving the rule of law will expose the nation to devastating terror attacks. He has repeatedly claimed that waterboarding as well as other abusive methods are all that stand between us and a repetition of 9/11 or much worse. But during his years in office, and especially during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, he became notorious for exaggerating and fabricating scary “intelligence” that was designed to ram through his political agenda.

Evidence that has emerged in recent days, through the release of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation,” provides little support for the former vice president’s bluster. As Spencer Ackerman notes in The Washington Independent, the uncensored portions of the IG report honestly concede that the effectiveness of those techniques is open to doubt.

The report does not conclude that Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the two ranking al-Qaida operatives captured after 9/11, revealed critical intelligence information because they were waterboarded dozens of times. Instead, the report indicates that most if not all vital information about the jihadi terror network was obtained through normal investigative work and questioning.

What Cheney and his supporters have tried to do, by grabbing brief quotations out of context, is to confuse interrogation per se with the abusive techniques. And what they purposely omit is the inspector general’s damning conclusions about the contradiction between official U.S. human rights policy, especially our condemnation of torture by other states, and the lawless brutality approved by the Bush-Cheney administration.

As for the argument that we cannot protect our security while upholding the law, that is an old canard that reappears—usually, but not always, in the mouths of Republicans—whenever intelligence abuses require investigation and possible prosecution. Many of the same people, including Cheney, uttered the same warnings back in the 1970s and ’80s, when Congress and federal prosecutors probed lawbreaking by the CIA.

But those landmark investigations were followed not by a diminishing of American security and power, but by the fall of the Soviet Union. It is the past eight years, when the Cheney outlook prevailed, that have seen a ruinous reduction in our prestige and influence—and perhaps our future security, as well.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.